Bushmanland

Located East of Etosha National Park, this is one of the remote region of the northern Kalahari known as Bushmanland. (This is an old name, which we use here for clarity; it remains what most people call the area.)

Drive east towards Tsumkwe, and you’re driving straight into the Kalahari. On their first trip here, people are often struck by just how green and vegetated it is, generally in contrast to their mental image of a “desert”. In fact, the Kalahari isn’t a classic desert at all; it’s a fossil desert. It is an immense sandsheet which was once a desert, but now gets far too much rainfall to be classed as a desert.

Look around you and you’ll realise that most of the Kalahari is covered in a thin, mixed bush with a fairly low canopy height, dotted with occasional larger trees. Beneath this is a fairly sparse ground-covering of smaller bushes, grasses and herbs. There are no spectacular sand dunes; you need to return west to the Namib for those!

The people: the San or Bushmen villagers
Here, amidst vegetated, fossil dunes, the Ju/’hoansi !Kung Bushman (sometimes simply called the Kung) live, scattered around in small villages. These are Bushmen of the Kalahari, also known as the San Bushmen.

The conventional view is that less than a century ago these people’s ancestors were a traditional hunter-gatherer society using Stone Age technology. Yet they possessed a knowledge of their environment that we are only just beginning to understand.

Because their understanding of their natural environment is amazing to witness, and their survival skills are beyond belief for many Westerners, tourism is increasingly seen as a vital source of revenue for these people. In placing a high value on traditional skills and knowledge, it is hoped that it will help to stem the erosion of their cultural heritage.